Mathematical modeling is well known in the art. Presently, mathematical models are in widespread use in nearly all forms of technologies such as in computer hardware and software and as an aide in the optimizing and improving of practically every development and manufacturing effort. As a result, mathematical models play an integral role in most technologies in use today.
These mathematical models have been developed and applied to a wide variety of technologies depending upon the intended need at the implementation site. One useful application of mathematical models today is in the field of health care. Delivering high quality health care efficiently generally requires making a large number of decisions as to which treatments to administer to which patients at what times and using what processes. While every conceivable alternative may be tried in an experimental setting to empirically determine the best possible approach, as a practical matter such a scenario is often impossible to carry out. Prohibitive factors such as the large number and combinations of interventions, the required long follow up times, the difficulty of collecting data and of getting patients and practitioners to comply with experimental designs, and the financial costs of the experiment, among other factors, all contribute to render an experimental approach impractical. Therefore it is highly desirable to use mathematical models in the development and implementations of high quality health care.
While offering a significant advantage over the experimental approach, the current usage of mathematical models in health care is not without shortcomings. Presently, mathematical models are generally used to address very narrow questions, such as the frequency of a particular screening test. More importantly, these models are discrete in scope and lack inclusion of any time factor at all, or include only one time period or a series of fixed time periods. In addition, these models generally do not include intervention factors or events that occur in the intervals between the fixed periods of other models, nor do they incorporate the dependencies between various parameters of the model, such as dependencies between biological features of a subject and its disease afflictions.
This invention generates a mathematical model of a feature common to subjects that is continuous in time, incorporates dependencies between the various parameters of the model, enables comparison of interventions that affect multiple features and allows for creation of simulated subjects that have all the pertinent features occurring in real subjects.